Distraction Factor and Agile

In my last assignment I led a couple of teams using SrumForTeamsystem. We followed the process guidance religiously. We had the teams located in open bays with full line of sight to each member. We thought we saluted and followed the spirit of agile pretty closely. We were productive - much more so than before we switched to an agile format - and much more predictable in release punctuality. But, then we stopped improving after about a year and plateaued. I wondered why.

Last January, I got everyone (20 people or so) into a room for lunch and a rap session. I planned on an hour and we went two and a half. I wanted to know "How is it working? Are you happy with how we do things? Are you happy with our pace? What can we do better?" Far and away the biggest complaint was the interruption factor. Time and again people complained that the open office format was too distracting during coding and construction when distractions are particularly harmful to productivity and quality. 

The emphasis there is important. I believe there are times when communal living is hurtful to forward progress in software development and actually harmful. Yes indeed, private offices are a good thing when it's time to get "in the zone" and code. Elaboration is done. Design is done. Implementation approaches have been hashed and rehashed. Now it's time to lay bricks. Coding is generally not a community project.

What's that sound? I think I can hear the "agile community" writ large howling from the rooftops. The XP people are seething. Nevertheless, I'm convinced controlling the distraction factor is something we in the agile community need to recognize as a real problem. Sometimes interruptions are best left until later.

How do we deal with it? My team had a couple of ideas. One was that people simply hang a "Do Not Disturb" sign for all to see. By the time you say "not now please" it's too late. You've been interrupted. Another was to separate a "quiet area" in the office just for uninterrupted work. Working from home is also a good isolation tool for the right people at the right time.

A high level conclusion I drew from this feedback was to remember that the team needs to feel comfortable. If half of them are fighting the environment then it's something to fix. One of my roles as a leader is to tear down the obstacles inhibiting my team. I'm completely comfortable doing things outside the lines of "the book" if the team wants it that way and produces more that way.

Cross-posted here.

Mingle With Postgres on Ubuntu 10.0.4

We’re evaluating Mingle, an agile project management solution from ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks offers versions of Mingle for both Windows and Linux. It’s integrated with either Oracle or Postgres databases.  We recommend using Linux and Postgres.  ThoughtWorks also provides canned installations of Mingle and Postgres on VMWare virtual machines for download. Our style is to get the full experience, so starting from a pre-installed VM isn’t for us.

After struggling to get Mingle working with Postgres and Oracle on Widnows 7 we were told by Mingle’s support team that only Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 are supported by Mingle at this time.

Since we’ve been diving into Linux more aggressively the past several months we decided to bring up an Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.0.4) virtual machine using VirtualBox and start there.  Installation of Mingle is pretty straight forward. Begin with Postgres, create a mingle user with DBA privileges, create an empty database for Mingle, unpack the Mingle tar ball and follow the installation instructions.

Update 29 June 2010

We have Mingle 3.1.1 running on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate with Postgres SQL 8.4. Following the defaults works fine. Install Postgres first, create an account called mingle with the create databases role. Create a database called mingle. You can call the user and the database anything you like. Finally install Mingle.

Installing SharePoint On Windows 7

Microsoft supports installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 on Windows 7. This is quite useful if you want to do custom development for SharePoint in Visual Studio 2010, which requires the SharePoint server to be installed on the same machine as the development environment. Prior to the 2010 release local SharePoint development required running Windows Server as your desktop OS or running a VM.

We installed SharePoint Foundation 2010 on a 64-bit Windows 7 desktop box today. The process went smoothly. If you develop for SharePoint we recommend Windows 7 as a solid platform from which to build.

Microsoft’s official article on this is here. There’s a comment on the thread that elaborates a bit on the experience here. Click on the date-time stamp to expand the comment text.

We’re happy to answer questions in comments in this space.

Windows Startup Analysis

RunAnalyzer by Safer Networking is a great tool for digging in to tune Windows performance. It gives you a deep look at everything in the system that initiates a service or task tray program on Windows launch. This tool is not for the meek, because you can easily manipulate the Windows registry, although registry access is structured just for things related to starting Windows. Here are a couple of screen shots.